Acrylamide Level in Food Largely Unknown

WASHINGTON -- Maureen Cohen read a newspaper article about cancer-causing acrylamide in her kids' favorite snacks and wanted to know more.

"I just got curious," said Cohen, a mother of three in Vienna, Va. "If it's known that it's a cancer-causing substance, I sure would like somebody to look into it and find out."

Acrylamide turns up in all kinds of tasty foods, including french fries, potato chips, breakfast cereals, cookies and crackers. But it's difficult for consumers to figure out how much acrylamide is in a particular meal or snack.

Nobody puts acrylamide in food. The chemical is a natural byproduct of cooking starchy food at high temperature.

So while you might find acrylamide in potatoes that are fried or baked at high temperatures, you might not find it in potatoes that are boiled and mashed.

French fries and potato chips already are well up on the list of bad-for-you foods.

Acrylamide also forms in plenty of other starches, like the toasted oats in Cheerios, the flour in hard pretzels or even the sweet potatoes in Gerber Tender Harvest organic baby food.

But compared with other worrisome chemicals in food, such as mercury in fish or benzene in soda, relatively little is known about how acrylamide forms, how it affects people or what to do about it. High levels of acrylamide in food were first reported by Swedish researchers in 2002.

Cohen looked on the Food and Drug Administration Web site to see how much acrylamide was in her potato chips _ reduced-fat Pringles _ but that kind of Pringles wasn't listed. She called the company but was told to provide a letter from her doctor.

Then she mentioned it to her father-in-law, who works for a nutrition and health advocacy group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Already aware of the chemical, CSPI began surveying manufacturers of 30 products. None provided information on how much acrylamide is currently in their products.

Now the group wants the government to publish more data on acrylamide in major brands. The most recent FDA data on brand-name foods is more than two years old.